Organizational Management of Overseas R&D: The Case of China

This paper focuses on the organizational management of overseas R&D by Chinese companies based on the framework created by Zedtwitz. We find that the majority China multinational companies take overseas R&D activities through cooperative projects and united labs with those associations in developed countries; a small group of multinational companies with solid international experience tend to manage their overseas R&D centers with Geocentric centralized and Polycentric decentralized structure. The global integrated network R&D management model has not been found in Chinese multinational companies yet, but it will be the future organization structure of China companies.